"There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art"
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Bruner is quietly picking a fight with the comforting story we tell ourselves about art: that interpretation is a flashlight aimed at truth. He’s warning that it can be a lampshade instead. Coming from a psychologist who helped shift his field toward meaning-making, the line reads less like anti-intellectualism and more like methodological suspicion. The mind is a narrative engine; it doesn’t just discover meanings, it manufactures them. When we “explain the experience of art,” we may be projecting our own need for coherence onto an object that resists being neatly possessed.
The phrase “possible meanings that emerge” does sly work. It concedes that interpretation is productive, even beautiful, but it also implies a proliferation problem: the more fluent we become at generating readings, the easier it is to mistake our interpretive output for the work’s core. “Mask” is the key verb - not “miss” or “distort,” but conceal. That suggests interpretation can become a kind of performance that substitutes for attention, a socially rewarded display of intelligence that covers over what’s harder to sit with: ambiguity, sensation, conflict, boredom, pleasure.
Bruner’s context matters. Mid-century psychology was busy chasing measurable certainty; Bruner argued humans live by stories, frames, and symbols. Here he turns that insight back on the humanities. He’s not telling us to stop interpreting; he’s telling us to notice how interpretation can become a defense mechanism, a way to keep art safely explainable rather than genuinely unsettling.
The phrase “possible meanings that emerge” does sly work. It concedes that interpretation is productive, even beautiful, but it also implies a proliferation problem: the more fluent we become at generating readings, the easier it is to mistake our interpretive output for the work’s core. “Mask” is the key verb - not “miss” or “distort,” but conceal. That suggests interpretation can become a kind of performance that substitutes for attention, a socially rewarded display of intelligence that covers over what’s harder to sit with: ambiguity, sensation, conflict, boredom, pleasure.
Bruner’s context matters. Mid-century psychology was busy chasing measurable certainty; Bruner argued humans live by stories, frames, and symbols. Here he turns that insight back on the humanities. He’s not telling us to stop interpreting; he’s telling us to notice how interpretation can become a defense mechanism, a way to keep art safely explainable rather than genuinely unsettling.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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